Our faith 2
catholicnewsherald.com | March 14, 2014 CATHOLIC NEWS HERALD
Faith Q&A
Pope Francis
One can’t dialogue with Satan, pope says; the Bible is the best defense
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hen temptation comes your way, don’t try to “dialogue” or argue with the devil, Pope Francis said, but seek refuge and strength in the words of the Bible. Addressing tens of thousands of people gathered for the Angelus in St. Peter’s Square March 9, Pope Francis spoke about the Gospel of Matthew’s account of Jesus’ temptation in the desert. “The tempter tried to divert Jesus from the Father’s plan, which was the path of sacrifice and love, of offering Himself in expiation, and instead convince Him to take the easy way of success and power,” the pope said. Each time the devil tempts Jesus – asking Him to transform stones into bread, throw Himself from the top of the temple and see if angels would rescue Him, or worship Satan in exchange for earthly power – Jesus responds by reciting Scripture, the pope said. “He doesn’t dialogue with Satan like Eve” did in the Garden of Eden, the pope said. “Jesus knows well that you can’t dialogue with Satan because he is so cunning.” “Remember this,” Pope Francis told the crowd, “at times of temptation, in our temptations: No arguments with Satan; defend yourselves with the word of God.” Pope Francis said Lent is a time for everyone to set out on the path of conversion and to prepare to renew their baptismal promises, including “renouncing Satan and all his works and his seductions – because he is a seducer – in order to walk the pathways of God.” The pope also asked those gathered in St. Peter’s Square to pray for him and his collaborators in the Roman Curia during their March 9-14 Lenten retreat. With more than 80 cardinals, archbishops and other top officials of Vatican offices, Pope Francis boarded a bus in the late afternoon to travel the 20 miles to a retreat house in Ariccia for joint reflection, prayer and silent meditation.
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk
Violinist violence I
n her still-widely-read 1971 article, “A Defense of Abortion,” Judith Jarvis Thomson sets up a thought experiment known as “The Famous Violinist Problem” to argue that abortion ought to be morally justified when a pregnancy arises out of sexual assault: “You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with a …famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own.... To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.” Most people would share the intuition that they should be able to unplug themselves from the violinist, since they didn’t consent to being hooked up in the first place. Others would suggest an analogy with becoming pregnant from rape, so the mother could “unplug” herself from the child by abortion. At least two serious problems, however, exist with this analogy. First, the famous violinist is not a good parallel for the child conceived by sexual assault. The violinist in Thomson’s thought experiment is basically a stranger to us. But the child conceived in rape is not, properly speaking, a stranger at all, and the analogy should probably be corrected to indicate this: “When the woman wakes up, she finds herself connected to a prodigy violinist who also happens to be her 12-year-old son.” In such a scenario, she would far more easily admit an obligation to remain attached to him, even for an extended period of time. Following a rape that results in pregnancy, a woman likewise finds herself connected to her own progeny, her own child in utero, with similar natural moral obligations to nurture and care for her own flesh and blood. The second problem with Thomson’s analogy is that abortion is not like “unplugging” a tube connecting one person to another, and allowing the dependent individual to expire from a condition like kidney failure. Instead, abortion invokes various surgical and obstetrical procedures that directly end the life of, and even dismember, the in utero child. Norma McCorvey, the former “Jane Roe” of the
Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, herself once worked in an abortion clinic and later described what happened there: “When a later abortion was performed, workers had to piece the baby back together, and every major part – head, torso, two legs, and two arms – had to be accounted for. One of our little jokes at the clinic was, “If you ever want to humble a doctor, hide a leg so he thinks he has to go back in.” Please understand, these were not abnormal, uncaring women working with me at the clinic. We were just involved in a bloody, dehumanizing business, all of us for our own reasons. Whether we were justifying our past advocacy (as I was), justifying a previous abortion (as many were) or whatever, we were just trying to cope – and if we couldn’t laugh at what was going on, I think our minds would have snapped.” McCorvey’s comments remind us that abortion is essentially a violent and deadly act, not a euphemistic “unhooking” or “separating” of mother and child. Thus we might wish to modify Thomson’s analogy once again to maintain parallelism: “A woman wakes up in the morning and finds herself attached to a violinist. To free herself from any further involvement with him, she asks a doctor to come in with a knife and to dismember the renowned musician.” The absolute wrongness of such direct killing would remain beyond dispute, as would the wrongness of any direct killing actions by a raped woman directed against her unborn son because of the sins of his father. In reflecting on the specifics of “The Famous Violinist Problem,” we begin to appreciate the importance of never subjecting an innocent third party, whether a musician or an in utero child, to direct lethal harm simply because they find themselves in a state of radical dependence upon another human being. Although we aren’t obligated to use extreme or extraordinary measures to try to save the violinist in Thomson’s thought experiment, we shouldn’t make the error of supposing that the state of pregnancy itself is somehow extraordinary or extreme, even in the tragic case of sexual assault, given that it objectively embodies the natural and familial line of duty to care for our own offspring.
What is the Holy Trinity? St. Patrick used the analogy of a shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity when converting the Celtic peoples. Just as in a shamrock there are three leaflets but one leaf, so in the Trinity there are Three Divine Persons but one God. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (253-255) states that we confess one God in three persons, the “consubstantial Trinity.” Each of them is entirely God and equal. They are distinct from one another: “It is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds.” (Lateran Council IV, 1215). But they are also relative to one another: “In the relational names of the persons the Father is related to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Holy Spirit to both.” (Council of Toledo XI, 675) ― AmericanCatholic.org
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk earned his doctorate in neuroscience from Yale and did post-doctoral work at Harvard. He is a priest of the diocese of Fall River, Mass., and serves as the director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia. See www.ncbcenter.org.
Your daily Scripture readings MARCH 16-22
Sunday (Second Sunday of Lent): Genesis 12:1-4, 2 Timothy 1:8-10, Matthew 17:1-9; Monday (St. Patrick): Daniel 9:4-10, Luke 6:36-38; Tuesday (St. Cyril of Jerusalem): Isaiah 1:10, 16-20, Matthew 23:1-12; Wednesday (St. Joseph): 2 Samuel 7:4-5, 12-14, 16, Romans 4:13, 16-18, 22, Matthew 1:16, 18-21, 24; Thursday: Jeremiah 17:5-10, Luke 16:19-31; Friday: Genesis 37:3-4, 12-13, 17-28, Matthew 21:33-43, 45-46; Saturday: Micah 7:14-15, 18-20, Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
MARCH 23-29
Sunday (Third Sunday of Lent): Exodus 17:3-7, Romans 5:1-2, 5-8, John 4:5-42; Monday: 2 Kings 5:1-15, Luke 4:24-30; Tuesday (The Annunciation of the Lord): Isaiah 7:10-14, 8:10, Hebrews 10:4-10, Luke 1:26-38; Wednesday: Deuteronomy 4:1, 5-9, Matthew 5:17-19; Thursday: Jeremiah 7:23-28, Luke 11:14-23; Friday: Hosea 14:2-10, Mark 12:28-34; Saturday: Hosea 6:1-6, Luke 18:9-14.
MARCH 30-APRIL 5
Sunday (Fourth Sunday of Lent): 1 Samuel 16:1, 6-7, 10-13, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:141; Monday: Isaiah 65:17-21, John 4:43-54; Tuesday: Ezekiel 47:1-9, 12, John 5:1-16; Wednesday (St. Francis of Paola): Isaiah 49:815, John 5:17-30; Thursday: Exodus 32:7-14, John 5:31-47; Friday (St. Isidore): Wisdom 2:1, 12-22, John 7:1-2, 10, 25-30; Saturday (St. Vincent Ferrer): Jeremiah 11:18-20, John 7:4053